@Christoffer - you’ve written a lot here and I don’t think I can give a point-by-point response while keeping my reply to a reasonable length. So, I’ll just offer some higher level comments and we can go from there.
First, I think that there are still some genuine internal tensions running through your account that you have not resolved. The one that stands out the most to me is the relationship between the “passenger seat” claim and the adaptive framework you’re building everything on. You’re arguing that consciousness is an emergent result of a massively complex adaptive system, but then you suggest that the emergent experience itself probably has no function, comparing it to the fractal pattern of a double pendulum. My worry is that these two commitments pull against each other. If the system is built by and for adaptability, and the experiential dimension is a reliable, metabolically expensive product of that system, it seems like you’d need a positive story about why selection would maintain something so resource intensive if it’s doing no work.
Furthermore, I think the double pendulum analogy doesn’t help your case in the way you need it to. My understanding is that fractal patterns are fully derivable from the dynamics. So if consciousness is like a fractal pattern in a chaotic system, then it should in principle be explicable in terms of the underlying dynamics, which doesn’t really fit with your claim that “we can’t grasp it”. It seems like you’re sliding from “this is very complex” to “this is beyond our capacity to understand”, and those are very different claims.
One final thought: you say we should look at consciousness as part of a natural system and find the physical framework underneath it, and I agree. But it seems like the argument then needs to do more than say “it’s very complex and emergent” otherwise you risk “emergence” becoming an empty placeholder until you can say what organizational features of the system give rise to which aspects of experience, and what functional role (if any) the experiential dimension plays in the system’s overall adaptive economy. Otherwise your appeals to emergence end up looking more like a promissory note rather than an real explanation.
A very thoughtful and well-written article. The parallel you draw between Husserl’s epochē and Buddhist śūnyatā is not something I had really considered – granted I’m not that familiar with Buddhism in the first place.
You raised a point in your essay that I’ve always had trouble with in regard to Buddhist theory and practice. The essay presents our tendency to “freeze the flux of experience into conceptual constructions” as something to be overcome — or at least held in suspension. But from the standpoint of how adaptive organisms actually work, that tendency looks less like a cognitive defect and more like a core feature of how embodied agents manage to navigate their environments at all. In other words, organisms model their surroundings because doing so is what keeps them viable. If that’s right, then the question isn’t just whether we can suspend reification as a contemplative exercise, but whether we should suspend reification for some deeper normative reason. What makes attending to the “flux” more “disclosive” than attending to the stable patterns we extract from it?
I’ve been mulling the option of whether to start a new thread, but so far I haven’t come up with something that I think would be worthy of its own thread topic. I seem to work better when I’m reacting to the ideas of others rather than coming up with grand ideas for others to react to. Or perhaps I’m just too self critical. Either way, it seems like our discussion came to a natural close, so I think I’m just going to let it rest for now.
When demonstrating a chaotic system, by running a program on a computer, for instance, you can pause it and say something like “Now watch, it’s starting to track in toward the attractor." There’s something you can point to. Same goes for the sorts of simulations Bedau talks about with Conway’s game of life or other cellular automata; you can point at the glider gun. There it is, the emergent phenomenon.
What about consciousness? What will you point at? As the tens of billions of dollars of AI infrastructure out there come online, or maybe quantum computers, can you imagine someone convincingly pointing at a screen and saying, "See? It’s conscious now.” What would they be pointing at?
Having said that, there are behavioral tests an anesthetist will use to determine if a patient is no longer conscious in the medical sense, and similar tests on the other side, to confirm that they’ve woken up. Other than that? It’s hard to say. There is some debate about which other animals are conscious in any sense, which might have a sense of self as we do, and so on.
I think it’s a problem for the naturalist side, as I’m sure @Wayfarer would agree, but it’s a problem for everyone. If you argue that science cannot account for consciousness because there’s nothing you can point to, what are you claiming is the thing that no one can point to? How do you know some scientific theory hasn’t explained consciousness if you can’t say exactly what they haven’t done?
I do think fundamentally it is a question for science, and my expectation is that a new definition of consciousness will eventually (ahem) emerge in the process, much as gravity has gone from a complete mystery we all have intimate experience of to one definition and then another and probably another after that.
David Chalmer’s answer to that is quite straightforward. His 1995 paper, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’ was one of the seminal events in the origin of ‘Consciousness Studies’ as an identifiable discipline (published in Volume 2 of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.)
He describes the so-called ‘easy’ problems of consciousness as including the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information by a cognitive system; the reportability of mental states; and several others. He says there is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically.
But, he says,
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience . When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
(The Nagel reference is to Nagel’s well-known essay ‘What is it Like to be a Bat’.)
So experience, or rather, experiencing, is the ‘something’ that nobody can point to - well, other than pointing at oneself. But I don’t know that you are conscious in the same way I know that I am conscious, because I know my own consciousness by way of being conscious.
(I’ve often felt that what Chalmers is trying to designate with the somewhat awkward phrase “what it is like” is not a mysterious inner ingredient, but the simple fact of lived being. Yet being — the most elementary fact of existence — is itself surprisingly elusive. It resists definition because it is presupposed in every attempt to define anything at all.)
I don’t dispute the biological and predictive-processing account. The question is different: does a third-person account of the process fully capture the first-person reality of experience? Calling experience an illusion doesn’t dissolve the lived reality — even if it is illusory in some sense, it is still experienced. A description of the physiology of pain is not itself painful (this is what is often called the explanatory gap). The issue is not whether consciousness evolved, but whether structural description captures the first-person quality of lived experience. I don’t think it does — and that limitation is significant in a way that is not itself visible to science.
The Bernstein quote is very good. The “Cartesian anxiety” diagnosis does seem to illuminate why the debate in philosophy of mind so often gets pulled into the familiar oscillation: either secure the mental within the natural order on clearly third-person terms, or risk sliding into something that looks epistemically unanchored.
Where I would still hesitate slightly is over how discontinuous the newer “consciousness studies” trajectory really is.
On the one hand, you’re surely right that the early modern picture you sketch—inner thought vs. outer nature—sets the agenda for much analytic philosophy of mind. Once cognition is tacitly framed as an inner domain whose relation to the physical must be explained, the hard problem almost inevitably appears. In that sense, Chalmers’ move to treat experience as fundamental can look less like a radical innovation and more like a pressure-release valve internal to the same problematic: the gap is granted, then managed by ontological elevation.
But on the other hand, I’m also not fully convinced the emerging 4E/enactive work is simply a continuation under a new banner. As mentioned before, what seems distinctive there is not just a different answer to the mind–body problem, but a reframing of the starting point. Instead of beginning with an already-isolated “inner” domain and asking how it hooks onto the world, many of these approaches begin from situated activity and only then abstract toward what we call “mental states.” If that shift is taken seriously, the Cartesian either/or you quote from Bernstein starts to lose some of its grip—not because we’ve solved it, but because the terrain that made it seem compulsory has been partially redescribed.
Still, my worry is that the field is presently bifurcated rather than fully re-founded. Much of what goes under “consciousness studies” continues to inherit the explanatory ambitions (and sometimes the metaphysical anxieties) of the earlier philosophy of mind, even when its rhetoric is anti-Cartesian. The result can be a kind of unstable hybrid: phenomenology at the front end, but explanatory expectations at the back end that still presuppose the very gap being resisted.
So I’m inclined to see a genuine shift in sensibility underway, but not yet a clean break of projects. The older problematic still exerts a kind of gravitational pull.
I’m curious how strongly you take Bernstein’s diagnosis here. Do you see the newer embodied/enactive approaches as genuinely escaping the Cartesian frame, or mainly as softening its consequences while remaining within it?
I see the pressure you’re highlighting, but I’m not sure I’m convinced the incompatibility is as deep as you suggest. It does seem right that two different notions of causation are in play. In lived agency, causes appear under the form of reasons and aims—what an action is for. In much of physics, by contrast, causation is modeled in terms of law-governed state transitions that support prediction. If one assumes these must be the same kind of explanation at the same level, a clash is almost inevitable. But what looks like a gap could instead reflect a difference in explanatory grain. The fact that half-lives are statistically tractable while individual decays are not doesn’t obviously make the cause unintelligible; it may just indicate that the relevant regularities are population-level.
Something similar may hold for intention. Understanding an action through the agent’s reasons is not obviously in competition with microphysical description; it operates at a different level of intelligibility. I do share some concern about the habit of labeling whatever resists current modeling as “random,” which can function more as a placeholder than an explanation. Still, I’m hesitant to move from that methodological worry to the stronger claim that the gap cannot in principle be bridged. It may be less a flat contradiction than a case where statistical, mechanistic, and purposive explanations are being asked to do the same job. The key question, as I see it, is whether physics must exclude purposive explanation in principle, or whether our current integration across levels simply remains unfinished.
Bernstein’s phrase ‘the Cartesian anxiety’ was quoted in other contexts and I was drawn to it, particularly in the way it used to be summarised on Wikipedia:
Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on “mind” as different from “body”, “self” as different from “other”.
I felt that this description really put the finger on something I sensed was central to much of modern philosophy. (The entry has since been updated but I prefer the older version.)
So - as for resolving that sense of anxiety. One of the references to it is a chapter in the book I mention in the OP, The Embodied Mind, Varela et al. It is difficult to summarise, but the core of the issue revolves around the representationalist idea of a ‘pre-given’ world, into which we, as subjects, are born, and to with which our cognitive abilities are thought to conform (or not.) This gives rise to that sense of separateness which I think characterises so much of the modern mind-set. The enactivist or embodied stance is a more participatory one - an expression they use is ‘building the road while walking it.’ So, understanding that or at least becoming aware of it, is not so much a scientific question as an existential one. It requires a change of stance or perspective, an overcoming of that sense of separateness, which is very much the project of The Embodied Mind (and of much of Continental philosophy in general).
But yes - I take your point. There are all manner of ‘uneasy hybrids’ in this space. Robert Lawrence Kuhn had a project last year where he surveyed (I think it was) 37 ‘theories of consciousness’, ranging across all kinds of approaches from the neurological to the esoteric. It’s kind of a ferment of ideas, which is not necessarily a bad thing. At least its being discussed, and as I said above, I think there’s a perceptible ‘generational change’ in the topic, with the influx of more sixties-oriented types, with their emphasis on the role of experiential insight as opposed to theoretical abstraction.
I’m struggling to understand what is meant by the idea that our experience of freedom is somehow an illusion? Conscious thought consumes calories, takes measureable time, impacts bodily actions in measureable ways, and has unique performance characteristics that are different from any of the underlying processes it draws from. How could any of that be true if it shares an identity with what you describe as a deeply deterministic process? (and how can you identify any process as being deterministic, let alone deeply so?)
Similarly, if we are to propose that our conscious experience shares an identity with an underlying process, then how can the conscious experience have one set of physical characteristics and the underlying process another?
If they are not sharing an identity, then why would the nature of one inform us as to the nature of the other?
I’m wondering if this is what Wayfarer is describing as the ‘tension’ in the explanation. Whatever the nature of the link between what you describe as the automatic cognitive processes and the higher level experiences, either the two share the same characteristics, or they don’t. If they don’t then nature of one doesn’t inform us of the characteristics of the other. If they do, then both must share the specific characteristics of consciousness, and our reduction of neurology to simpler systems is lost.
At base the urge to separate the two comes less from a habit or urge on our part, and more from the logic of the structure being discussed. If they are not somehow separated, then they they are a single process with the same characteristics, and the various features of our experience of consciousness simply become physical attributes of our neurology that we have yet to find. Even if we deem the experience of consciousness as a byproduct, or passenger or illusion, rather than granting it agency, it would still need to be physically there in our neurology. Unless the physical neurology is separate in some way.
Could we resolve this by adopting a variation on Chalmer’s supervenience, and have one or both as incomplete subsets of a larger whole? Or does that create it’s own issues?
This is an interesting question, however it’s somewhat tangential to the OP, which is to consider the contrast between traditional ‘philosophy of mind’ and the rather more recent, inter-disciplinary ‘consciousness studies’.
But I’ll leave @Christoffer to respond to the question about free will and determinism.
What I am arguing is that the assumption that this difference is simply one of explanatory grain is the principal problem itself. That assumption encourages the person to continue inquiring in the same way, under the same precepts, believing that the gap will some day be closed, instead of considering that we might be at a dead end in this line of investigation, and thinking perhaps that a completely different perspective is required.
So in the example of the half-life of radioactive decay, there is a clear dead end. The decay rate is predictable but individual nucleus disintegration is random. The principles employed by quantum mechanics designate that nuclear disintegration is random. Therefore you would be stepping outside the confines of our current knowledge to propose that there is a “population-level” (whatever that might mean in this context) reason why there is a transmutation of one specific nucleus rather than another. Instead of accepting that the dead end is a dead end, you are proposing that maybe if we keep banging our heads against the wall, we might find a way through.
Instead of accepting what physicists tell us, that it is impossible to predict the transmutation of individual nuclei, you are proposing something contrary, that perhaps we might be able to find a “population-level” cause. However, if we accept that this route of inquiry has reached a dead end, then we can go back to a completely different perspective, the approach of the philosophy of mind. And from this perspective we have the premises required to understand the reality of immaterial (nonphysical) causation.
What is taught in this field, is that the immaterial (nonphysical) causation is priori to physical causation. This we come to understand through the nature of free will. A freely willed act has no physical cause. But, it causes physical change. Therefore, we have a cause of physical change, which is not a physical change itself, it is an immaterial, nonphysical activity. And that immaterial, nonphysical activity is shown to be prior to, as the cause of, physical activity.
This perspective produces the need for a completely different sort of knowledge. This type of activity cannot be observed, only the effects of it can be observed. Therefore it escapes the boundaries of what can be grasped by empirical knowledge. Furthermore, the premise of immaterial causation being prior to material activity, leads to an understanding of time which is radically different from that which is employed by the empirical sciences. From this perspective we can conclude that the empirical sciences use a faulty representation of time.
I would say that the best approach toward answering this question would be to look at how the different disciplines represent time. We could look at how the empirical science of consciousness models time, and how the philosophy of mind understands time, and if these two are incompatible then we have a gap which cannot be bridged.
Ah, I had taken the barrier to integrating the two apporaches to be the reluctance within traditional theory of mind to grant consciousness agency, and within consciousness studies to grant a role to purely biological processes.
But yes, I appreciate that this is a large and sprawling topic, and I’m happy to await a more tqargeted thread.
@Wayfarer — The Varela reference is apt, and I think the “building the road while walking it” image captures something important. The participatory framing does get at something that representationalism systematically obscures: that knowing is an activity of a situated organism, not the passive reception of a ready-made picture.
But I want to push on something. I think the enactivist critique of the “pre-given world” is right about one thing and potentially misleading about another.
What it gets right: the world as known is not simply handed to us. Cognition is an achievement — it involves selection, structuring, abstraction, and all of the embodied activity that the 4E literature emphasizes. The naive picture where the world just stamps itself onto a passive mind is rightly rejected.
What it risks: collapsing the distinction between the activity of knowing and the content that knowing discloses. If we say that cognition “enacts” or “brings forth” a world, we need to be very careful about what that means. If it means that without cognitive activity there would be no known world — fine, that’s trivially true. But if it means that the intelligible structure we discover is constituted by our enacting rather than disclosed through it, then I think we’ve traded one problematic gap (Cartesian inner/outer) for another problematic collapse (knower and known become indistinguishable).
And I think this is where the “existential” framing you mention can become a bit slippery. The overcoming of separateness is real and important at the phenomenological level — yes, we are not ghosts peering out at an alien world through a keyhole. But the epistemic asymmetry between knower and known still needs to be preserved. The fact that inquiry can go wrong, that we are corrected by what we discover, that our best frameworks can be overturned — all of this requires that reality is not simply co-constituted with our cognitive activity but genuinely constrains it.
So I’d say the Cartesian anxiety isn’t resolved by participation alone. Participation without normativity (truth and error) gives you a kind of “pragmatic embeddedness” that’s phenomenologicaly satisfying, but philosophically incomplete. What’s needed, I think, is an account of how the situated, embodied knower is nonetheless answerable to something that exceeds their current framework — how the road we’re building can turn out to have been built in the wrong direction, and how we can recognize that.
The real escape from the Cartesian frame, in my view, isn’t to dissolve the subject-object distinction but to reconceive it. The subject isn’t an enclosed inner space; the object isn’t an inaccessible outer thing. But there is still a real distinction between the act of knowing and what the act is about — and that distinction is what makes error, correction and genuine discovery possible.
On the “ferment of ideas” point — I agree its not a bad thing. But I do sometimes worry that the sheer diversity of approaches in consciousness studies can function as a kind of implicit argument from complexity: “the problem is so hard that all approaches are equally valid.” They’re not. Some of them are asking better questions than others, and part of the philosophical task is to figure out which ones those are.
I’m gonna try and condense things since the previous post can be considered the detailed breakdown. You (@A.Rutledge) and @Wayfarer have some similarities in objections so answering one might answer the other’s question and vice versa.
I think the main thing here from you is a strong pull to separate the process I described as the function of consciousness, with the experience of consciousness (in form, qualia), categorizing them as two separate things, each with their own separate function.
I am saying there’s no separation and that it is this separation that is the cause of much of the problems with the separation in the philosophy of the mind/consciousness. That even if the mind/body duality has been put to rest, philosophers have essentially invented a new duality between the physical entirety of the mind and body–and the abstract phenomenological experience.
And my point is that I think this will reach a similar fate as the mind/body duality, in that it will end up as a single thing, the process is the experience and the experience is the process.
The experience is both a byproduct, unintentional and part of the process itself. But the “passenger seat” analogy is meant to demonstrate how we relate to this experience.
In order for the process to function as its supposed to, the illusion must be maintained.
A better analogy might be us as a kid on the passenger seat, with a toy steering wheel. If the driver and the car represent the process; the physical machine and the “algorithm” that reacts and acts; our direct experience is of that process while we play with the toy steering wheel, feeling like we are the ones driving the car. The experience is of the entire thing and the illusion is that we are steering. But we are just turning the toy steering wheel in the direction the car is already going; it feels like we are causing the turn, because nothing pulls us from that experience. If the car were to turn left while we turn the toy steering wheel right, we would feel this separation, it would equal a mental breakdown.
We describe us in the passenger seat as the agents of our existence, it’s the perspective we hold when thinking about what it means to “be”. But this is the illusion.
It’s not that we are separated from the process, it’s that we are there and part of it but have this arbitrary split that causes us to not be aware of it. The experience we think about when we think about our qualia, is just the feedback stream from the automated entity that is us.
We could basically say that this is about the conscious and the unconscious, but what I’m saying is that the unconscious is all there is… the conscious is just an illusion, it’s like a TV broadcast of the unconscious process that we passively watch.
When you read this text, it is the unconscious, the process, that is reading and automatically causing reactions and a set of actions to take in the future. What constitutes your personality, your individual behavior, is the composition of how your autonomous system has been formed since birth. Your experience of the process handling this reading and then writing, is just a passive one.
I’m trying to find good analogies for this that makes it easier to communicate. If we look at a set of music notes, it could represent the process. If we had a slider that were moving at the set time across the notes and as soon as the slider crosses each note, they play. Our entire being is this set of notes, but the slider moving across it is our experience of these notes.
The slider itself does not exist, it is just the nexus at which the process operate in time. And it is at this point we hear the music, that is the experience. But the music itself does not exist on this sheet of music.
We experience the process as it happens, we experience our process reacting, acting, changing, adapting. We experience all of it as a passive observer, yet we’re both the process and the observer, intertwined, inseparable.
I think it’s this that makes it hard to communicate what I mean.
We experience ourselves as the music, yet what flows is the process of the notes through time. The music is just the byproduct of the process, and we experience our automatic process reacting to this byproduct and it becomes part of the experience itself.
It is this that is our self-awareness. A system, acknowledging the system itself as part of the system.
Chaos theory and emergent systems are explainable and could in all cases be understood in the reductionist way. But the double pendulum analogy describes a very simple system causing an emergent pattern that is replicable. If we look at emergent systems in nature, they aren’t so easily mathematically understood. The double pendulum is just a second magnitude more complex than a single pendulum, and it causes an absolutely massive increase in complexity.
Nature and the physical universe, is almost infinite in how many orders of magnitude the pendulum has. It is almost, or maybe even physically impossible to map such systems in a reductionist way. Which is why I think quantum mechanics requires probability in order to be understood and why probability math is the only way we can understand nature and the universe, rather than attempting absolute mathematical certainty.
If we have the exponential complexity of adaptability as an evolutionary trait as the foundational chaotic operation. The emergent result is the complexity of human behavior. How any moment of adapting strategy the system takes, in all instances, form a chaotic push and pull processing leading to each behavioral moment and internalized simulation of the outside world. That is what is emerging.
But I don’t think our experiential dimension (which is a better word for it perhaps) of this process is an illusion that is basically the form our entire consciousness takes on. The process we have, informs what form the experience is and this form is what we experience as “us”. We do not exist in that form, it is only a result, it’s the nexus point on the musical sheet having the sheet and notes move through it and causing us to vibrate as the music.
The attempt I made was to build thoroughly from the evolutionary development into the nature of experience, because I think it’s important to build the model of us from the ground up, even if we can’t quantify an emergent complexity in reductionist way.
Maybe what I wrote above this helps explain what I mean.
I don’t think I’m really trying to describe the structure, rather I’m trying to explain a shift in perspective needed to view your own experience in a new way.
If what I described about how consciousness functions as an evolved system concludes that the process is an automatic entity that constantly adapts to the world and its own adaptations, that is indeed just the structural description of it.
But that’s just the premise and support of what I’m trying to get at. That the experience we have is us experiencing the “stream” of this process. That the individual human we are, operates on an automatic, algorithmic process that forms complexity in behavior far beyond other animals due to this moment to moment adaptation, and this “automatic human” is the real us. What we think is us, is a passive experience of this automatic process and the illusion of free will is derived from this passive experience.
We experience our automation in real time, which gives the illusion that we are in control of this process.
An objection to this claim usually consists of pointing at automation not able to give raise to the complexity and depth of what constitutes the human experience, but I would argue that the formation of our consciousness from birth to adulthood is a process of constantly exponential increases in complexity of this automatic system, and that the reason why we think we have free will is because the passive experience of such a complex system becomes indistinguishable from agency.
What we experience is the current moment of operation that is flowing through the automatic system. It is the experience of the operation itself, our process; the operations happening and our mind registering it as part of the consolidation for further operating.
Our first-person experience as we refer to it, is therefore the experience of the process happening, the experience of the operation; the sum of this operation. It is not a “dimension of agency”, but an illusion of agency we experience as agency because we cannot see or feel the parts of our own operation.
A “conscious choice” is not an operation from or within our experience, it is a deeper operation and the experience we have of it is part of our consciousness registering its action as part of the next operation in time. Our passive experience of it, feels like an agency of choice, like us steering, but it’s just “watching ourselves operate from within the action”.
It is very hard to convey what I mean here, but I am trying to underscore what the first-person experience is, not just the evolutionary trait and physiological construct of our brain. I understand what you mean with the difference between lived experience, the “first person” experience and understanding the structure, it’s the classic Mary in the black and white room scenario. And it is this I try to reach past with different analogies and explanations.
You can check the answer to Wayfarer and A.Rutledge here as well, but in essence, our operation as humans is automatic. It is acting and reacting, adaptively to the world around it and genetic programming within it that has its cause in previous generations adaptations towards their world around them.
What I’ve been trying to convey in here is that the first-person experience that we refer to when we speak of what we think is “us”, is a stream of passive experience of this automatic process that is operating on deterministic causes. The complexity of this automated system we call consciousness causes the experience of its operation to feel like agency, thus we feel like we are acting freely.
Causality and determinism do not just mean that the marble moves because it was hit by another marble. The consequence of an event can have a cascading consequence of events. Our consciousness reacting adaptively to something internal or external, could take the form of a cascading chain of events; an input generating the simulation of possible consequences to find the best path based on previous causes registered as samples in memory, leading to an action that cascades into the physiological effects you described, as well as the action out in the world that in each moment it happens forms a new input that cause the same processing to happen; and so it goes, fraction of a fraction of time until our process stops at death.
And the first-person experience of that, is what we register as a life with freedom of choice. Yet it is just the echo of the process and the process is an automatic operation that shifts and take new forms based on the deterministic factors at play. Our “identity” is merely the form that this automatic system takes, and it is in the reaction this “identity” has with everything that we experience our separation to everything around us.
@Meta_U — I think you’re right that the difference between first-person and third-person accounts isn’t simply one of explanatory grain, and I appreciate the push against a naive “just keep going and the gap will close” optimism. But I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from the right observation.
Let me take your points in turn.
On the radioactive decay analogy: I agree that quantum indeterminacy represents a genuine limit on a certain kind of explanation — deterministic prediction of individual events. But I don’t think it follows that the limit reveals a domain of “immaterial causation.” It reveals a limit on one explanatory mode. And the history of physics is full of cases where apparent dead ends turned out to be invitations to reconceive what explanation looks like, rather than invitations to abandon the natural order altogether. Statistical mechanics didn’t “close the gap” by predicting individual molecular trajectories; it reframed what counted as an adequate explanation at that level. The dead end was real, but what it called for was a different kind of naturalistic explanation, not a leap to a non-physical causal order.
On free will and immaterial causation: this is where I think things go off the rails a bit. You say “a freely willed act has no physical cause” as though this were an established premise, but its actually the conclusion of an argument you haven’t given. The claim that free acts have no physical cause — not merely that they are not exhaustively explained by physical causes — is extraordinarily strong, and I don’t think it’s warranted by what we actually know about agency.
Here’s what I’d want to distinguish. There is a real and important difference between:
(a) the reasons for which someone acts (justifications, values, purposes — what Sellars would call the “space of reasons”)
(b) the causal processes that realize and enable that action (neural, bodily, environmental — the “space of causes”)
These are genuinely different levels of description with different norms of adequacy. You can’t derive a justification from a neuron firing pattern, and you can’t predict the specific content of a rational decision from brain-state descriptions alone. In that sense, I share your intuition that something important is being missed by the purely third-person account.
But — and this is crucial — the fact that rational normativity is irreducible to physical causation (and I do agree with you here) does not entail that rational acts have no physical realization or that they operate through a separate causal channel. That’s a non sequitur. The irreducibility is epistemic and normative, not necessarily causal in the way you seem to mean. My decision to accept a conclusion because it follows from premises I hold true is not exhaustively explained by the underlying neural activity, but it is realized in that activity. The rational and the physical aren’t two competing causal stories; they’re two different levels of intelligibility applied to the same concrete event.
Your picture — immaterial causation as “prior to” physical causation — ends up creating exactly the kind of dualism that makes the mind-body problem intractable. If mental causation operates in a fundamentally different causal order, then we’re stuck with the interaction problem all over again: how does the immaterial cause produce physical effects? You haven’t closed the gap; you’ve just relocated it.
On time: I’m genuinely curious what you have in mind here, so I don’t want to dismiss it prematurely. But I’d note that “the empirical sciences use a faulty representation of time” is doing a lot of heavy lifting without a lot of argument behind it. Faulty for what purposes? Physics, biology, and neuroscience each already operate with somewhat different temporal frameworks (reversible laws vs. irreversible processes vs. experiential duration), and none of them claims to exhaust what time is. If the philosophy of mind reveals further dimensions of temporality — lived duration, the protentional-retentional structure of consciousness, etc. — that’s genuinely illuminating, but it doesn’t make the empirical representations faulty. It means they’re partial descriptions adequate to their own explanatory aims.
So where does this leave us? I think the gap between first-person and third-person accounts is real but it’s a gap between levels of intelligibility, not between two incompatible causal orders. What’s needed isn’t a retreat from naturalism into immaterial causation, but a richer naturalism — one that can acknowledge the irreducibility of rational normativity without pretending that this irreducibility requires a separate metaphysical domain. The alternative you’re proposing doesn’t actually solve the problem; it just makes the problem harder by introducing a second kind of causation whose relation to the first becomes permanently mysterious.
I don’t see that you are getting anywhere here EQV. You are simply proposing that we compromise in our criteria as to what constitutes “an adequate explanation”. Statistical analysis does not really have any explanatory capacity. Being able to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow morning does not provide any explanation about the relationship between the earth and the sun. In reality, your proposal of “a different kind of naturalistic explanation”, is nothing but a request to replace explanation with prediction.
It appears to me, that you think “things go off the rails” with this mention of free will, because you haven’t spent decades studying the metaphysics like I have. These principles have been developed over thousands of years, with volumes of material by a multitude of authors, through extensive study. So it will remain as the conclusion of an argument that I haven’t given. The point though, is to open your eyes to the evidence, show you that these arguments do exist, and that they have stood the test of time, and continue to exist. So, the alternative approach is available to you, and the onus is on me not to provide you with a conclusive argument, but to inspire you inquire, study the material yourself, and consider the evidence which most people close their minds to.
I can lay out the difference here for you, in very simple, straight forward, and easy to understand terms. The determinist causation approach apprehends everything which happens at the present as a necessary continuity of what has happened in the past. The free will approach sees that the future consists of real possibilities, which can be selected from. Further, there is a requirement for an agent in the free will approach, that which selects, otherwise the actualization of possibility is reduced to random chance.
The agent is the key difference. The determinist can claim “possibilities” based on lack of knowledge, unknowns, and things occurring by random chance. The free will approach allows that something (called “the agent” here) selects from real possibilities. The agent is free from past (determinist) causation, and selects from possibilities not by the force of determinism, nor by chance or random occurrence.
Sure, it’s not a simple deductive argument with a valid conclusion, unless we start with premises which you would simply designate as “off the rails”. That’s why I didn’t provide an argument. So this is a matter of assessing the evidence, and determining whether the evidence would support the premises which would produce a sound deductive argument. Therefore we need to consider seriously what constitutes the claims of “immaterial”, and “non-physical”.
That is why I point you to the nature of time, as we know, and experience it. Let’s suppose that the past consists of things which have occurred, and cannot be changed, while the future affords some possibility. You might agree that this is consistent with your experience. We can ask now, what does it mean for there to be possibilities in the future.
Consider these two possibilities, I might be at work tomorrow, or I might be at home. Neither, I will be at work tomorrow, or I will be home tomorrow, is true, because each is possible. So what type of existence does tomorrow have? It does not exist as something set in stone which cannot be changed, like yesterday does. On this basis, I can propose that tomorrow exists in some sort of immaterial, or non-physical way. There cannot be physical realities in tomorrow because it consists of possibilities. We have to assign some form of reality, or existence to tomorrow though, to validate and ground the possibilities which we attribute to it. But this is not a material or physical reality. So tomorrow is real, but it’s nonphysical because we cannot use normal forms of predication to say what is and is not the case about tomorrow, we have to say what may be the case.
The argument I’ve made above ought to show you that this proposal can not be correct. “The rational” is guided by intent, what is desired for the future. “The physical” is a description based in the past, what has occurred. Let’s assume “the same concrete event” refers to what is occurring at the present. Notice that it is the perspective of “the physical” which dictates that this is a “concrete event”. The perspective of “the rational”, allows for the interference of the immaterial, the activity of the agent which selects from future possibilities, to be a part of that supposed “concrete event”, and this means that “concrete event” is a misnomer. The proposal that what is occurring at the present is a “concrete event” is a matter of begging the question.
That’s right, I haven’t closed the gap, because I am arguing that the attempt to close the gap is misguided. Closing of the gap is analogous with the determinist assumption that there is a continuity of time and physical existence, from past through present and into the future. That proposed continuity “closes the gap”. The free will perspective shows that this assumed continuity is incorrect. This produces the need for a discontinuity in physical existence which we might call “the gap”. The discontinuity implied by the reality of free will, inspires the position adopted by some mysticisms and theologies, that the entire physical world is recreated at each moment of passing time. That discontinuity implies a gap.
Faulty for the purpose of truth. That different scientific fields use different temporal models adapted to the purposes of those fields, is a good indication that truth is not the goal when modeling time in science.
